noreply email address. [closed]

I'm sending out a notification email every day to our customers, when new data in our service becomes available. No, it's not spam, it's a notification that customers have asked for, and can be turned off - just in case you were wondering. :)

I noticed that some websites have a [email protected] address which they use to send all the notifications?

Why not just use an email address that is an alias to the support email. That way, if somebody replies to a notification (meaning they have a question) it goes directly to support. Why even bother explaining that "BTW, this email is not supposed to be used for support, please don't reply - use something else instead" when you could just have both pointing to the same inbox anyway? Or is there some other reason that I'm missing?

I think part of it is so that auto replies (vacations, etc.) are not sent to support.

This is an intriguing question, but alas off-topic.

Why is this voted as "off topic"? I'm working on sending an email report and I noticed many websites use this noreply thing, so I was wondering if there is any actual reason behind it or it's just stupid? It's definitely on topic and programming related. At least for web developers.

"Off topic?" It's all in how you ask the question. e.g. "When developing a website, why should notifications have a "[email protected]" address" is on topic. Your question sounds more like a rant than anything else (sorry mate, no offence meant)

It's off topic because Stack Overflow is about programming, not e-mail configuration.

Best Answer

Maybe they don't want to read all the vacation and failure notices.

comments:

Never thought about that. Thought it's just one of those bad practices that nobody ever questions. :) Well, I guess I'll need to use a noreply address too then for what I'm doing now. Thanks for the answer. It was a serious question. Don't understand why it's "off topic".

Other Answer1

Small web sites probably do that, but eBay would be getting 10's of thousands of support emails per day (more than already) if that were the case. They could implement an automated filter of the noreply email address to find some that might need answering.

Other Answer2

I guess it also comes to down to the fact that sending you an email from a [email protected]* address isn't actually instigating a conversation. If they send you an email to which they want or need a response, or are responding to an email you've sent them, of course it makes no sense to use such an address.

So I don't think it's particularly down to technology, and more about expectations and conforming to people's existing mental models of how conversations and general sales pitches work.